Starting with dinner at the Venician, you see the excess. Part of CE 3709 Vistage group posed with me in front of a Formula Race Car. They will be shutting down the strip to run it this week in front of all the casinos. Tickets start at $1000, and you can’t see it otherwise unless you buy the 5x higher room prices with a view. No one does excess like Vegas!
The contrast has to be the tour we took of Zappos the next morning. The first time I took this tour was in 2015 when the idea of driving all the company metrics from their values and all their values from treating their people and all people well was startling and new. It has only gotten better since then.
This was only one part of their innovation. Shoes, which is where they started, was the commodity of choice. The proof of concept was for running an exceptional company. It is so exceptional Amazon bought them in 2017. They haven’t changed much of anything. The purchase agreement defines the hands off policy and they continually learn from each other.
The other side of Vegas can be seen at the Mob Museum. As my lawyer husband said after 4 stories of a dense and well described history of the mob and onto today’s cartels, the underside is alive and well all over the world. And you can see it all in one quick trip to Vegas.
Oh and don’t leave out the working people like those we met at our host, Stephen Schwartz’s window distribution company. Yes, real people work real jobs in Vegas.
Like most Vistage groups on a retreat, we learned, we had fun and got closer as a group. We built our culture one activity at a time!
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